Nasa's Curiosity rover has identified its primary target, Mount Sharp, a mound of layered rock three miles high, rising from the floor of Gale Crater.

The nuclear-powered rover sent back its clearest image to date of the mountain, which towers behind the 96-mile-wide crater where it landed last week.

The black and white photograph also captures a shadow of the rover, which will begin its ascent of the mountain by the end of the year.

Before beginning the 7-km trek to the base of Mount Sharp, a journey expected to take months, the six-wheeled Curiosity will visit a relatively nearby site named 'Glenelg,' which caught scientists’ interest because it includes three types of terrain.

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Exploration: This black and white photo shows the Curiosity rover's surroundings on Mars

Researchers at Nasa have already begun plotting potential routes for the Curiosity rover. This route, marked in blue, would take the rover up onto Mount Sharp, a vast mountain which Nasa is keen to examine.

Engineers have spent the last week
upgrading the software on the rover, changing it from a landing mode to a
driving mode to prepare it for its first tentative spin on the surface
of Mars.

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Curiosity has a separate drive
motor on each of its six wheels and steering motors on the four corner
wheels.

Preparation and testing of the motor controllers will precede
the first drive.

After the test drive, the planning schedule has an 'intermission' before
a second testing phase focused on use of the rover's robotic arm.

For
the intermission, the 400-member science team will have the opportunity
to pick a location for Curiosity to drive to before the arm-testing
weeks.

'It's fair to say that the scientists, not to mention the rover drivers,
are itching to move,' said JPL's Ashwin Vasavada, deputy project
scientist for Curiosity.

The Gale crater, where Curiosity landed. The team are now plotting route for the rover to get the Mount Sharp, where it will search for the ingredients for life.

Researchers have been examining images from Curiosity's cameras and
HiRISE to identify potential targets to investigate near the rover and
on the visible slope of the nearby three-mile-high mound informally
named Mount Sharp.

'The science and operations teams are evaluating several potential
routes that would take us to Mount Sharp, with perhaps a few waypoints
to inspect some of the different terrains we've identified as we map the
landing area,' Vasavada said.

'As we have reported many times before,
it's going to take us a good part of our first year to make it to the
layered sediments on Mount Sharp.'

During a prime mission of nearly two years, researchers will use
Curiosity to investigate whether the selected area of Mars has ever
offered chemical ingredients for life and other environmental conditions
favorable for supporting microbial life.

Curiosity carries 10 science
instruments with a total mass 15 times as large as the science payloads
on NASA's Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity.

To handle this science toolkit, Curiosity is twice as long and five
times as heavy as Spirit or Opportunity.

The landing site inside Gale
Crater places the rover within driving distance of layers of Mount
Sharp.

Observations from orbit have identified clay and sulfate minerals
in the lower layers, indicating a wet history.

Nasa has also revealed the new colour images of Curiosity on the surface of Mars

The space agency also released the first color image taken from orbit showing NASA's rover Curiosity on Mars (above).

It includes details of the layered bedrock on the floor of Gale Crater that the rover is beginning to investigate.

Operators of the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter added the color view to earlier observations of Curiosity descending on its parachute, and one day after landing.

'The rover appears as double bright spot plus shadows from this perspective, looking at its shadowed side, set in the middle of the blast pattern from the descent stage,' said HiRISE Principal Investigator Alfred McEwen, of the University of Arizona, Tucson.

'We plan to get one in a few days looking more directly down, showing the rover in more detail and completing a stereo pair.'

Meanwhile, Curiosity has finished a four-day process transitioning both of its redundant main computers to flight software for driving and using tools on the rover's arm. During the latter part of the Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft's 36-week flight to Mars and its complicated descent to deliver Curiosity to the Martian surface on Aug. 5, PDT (Aug. 6, EDT and Universal Time), the rover's computers used a version of flight software with many capabilities no longer needed. The new version expands capabilities for work the rover will do now that it is on Mars.